


Promise: A (Promising) Rewrite

by Nitrobot



Series: Metamorphosis [3]
Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: F/M, Identity Issues, Rewrite, Transformer Sparklings, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:54:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26148259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nitrobot/pseuds/Nitrobot
Summary: 'The death of a child was said to be like the death of a sparkmate. Neither were wounds that would ever heal.'A makeover of the first chapter of everyone's favorite(?) TFA Blackarachnia backstory ripoff.
Relationships: Airachnid/Megatron (Transformers), Airachnid/Optimus Prime, Elita One/Optimus Prime
Series: Metamorphosis [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/131538
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	Promise: A (Promising) Rewrite

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Promise](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1181459) by [Nitrobot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nitrobot/pseuds/Nitrobot). 



> Ah, Promise, my four-year 200k word long labor of love. For a while I’ve resisted the urge to give my very first ‘masterpiece’ a well-deserved rewrite, knowing that it would take far too long to do the whole fic and that there’d be no point since, at the end of the day, it would still be the same story with the same beginning, middle and end. But the thought of doing quick rewrite of just the beginning with my much-improved writing skills was enough to pique my interest, and here we are. Whether you’re a fan of the original story or have never heard of it until now, I hope you like this alternate/revamped edition of chapter 1.
> 
> (and if you do read the OG story please be nice to the first 20 or so chapters, baby Nitro was a stupid teenager. but now I'm a stupid adult!)

Rain on Earth was a far different spectacle to the kind that once drenched Cybertron in its better days. Dark and ferrous clouds from the Rust Sea would gather over the nearest cities, warning all with insufficient armor to find shelter before the flood from the sky began- not of water, but of acid and oil. Those in Tarn and Kaon and Helex, where the eyesores of refinieries and mines were kept away from delicate optics, had the worst of it. The fumes from the factories would turn the clouds into bloated pitch-black beasts that vomited thick, toxic sludge onto the streets below, and the miners and fighters would simply trudge through the runoff on their way to another workday.

Optimus tried not to remember such things in the midst of this rain, the harmless water; cool and refreshing even as it threatened to drive rust into his hinges. It was a heavy downpour, streaming down his armour even as the heat of his engines made it evaporate into a fine mist around him.

The rest of the Autobots were confined to base during such weather- though they’d been guests of Earth for several stellar cycles, some had yet to properly adapt to the quirks of an organic world. Others simply took the time as a well-earned break from active duty… Optimus included. For one such as a Prime, solitude was a rare mercy even in times of peace. He was the one that everyone looked to for direction, the one who had an answer and plan for everything. The reality couldn't be further from his soldiers expectations, of course, but it didn't hurt to let them hold hope. In fact, to not have hope would have been more fatal than a strike from Megatron himself. Optimus prided himself most on being an approachable leader to what people he had left to lead, but maintaining such illusions gave little time for recluse.

He had the forest, at least. Far enough from Jasper to escape the desert heat but close enough to return to base by alt-mode if needed, it was a favourite place of meditation for him; the cover of trees shielded him from wandering Decepticons, while also amplifying the soothing sounds of earthly nature and approach of potential enemies. While Optimus was away gathering his thoughts, Ratchet was entrusted with overseeing the base and team- as well as deflecting any suspicions about the Prime’s unaccounted absence. Everything was accounted for, as expected of a Prime. Even so, worry constantly gnawed at his spark during his excursions, holding back any true sense of peace he might have gained. But, at the very least, he was alert at all times.

Otherwise, he may never have seen the faint stain of energon on the fern leaf in front of him.

It was a fresh mark, still glowing and only now succumbing to the relentless hammering of the rain. Drip, drip, drip onto the forest floor, washing away into nothing. There’d been no reported incidents of incoming transport pods, ships, or other indications of new Cybertronian arrivals recently. Which meant the energon could only be from a rogue Decepticon. Whether the fuel was from itself or any unfortunate tag-along victims, there was no doubt that it would be hostile.

In the nanoklick it took to reach that conclusion, Optimus engaged his guns and ducked behind a tree, scanning the immediate area for any spark signals or EM fields. None in range… he inched forwards, aiming the barrels in his hands left and right as he stalked through the soaked undergrowth. Even if the 'Con had somehow cloaked their signal and scrambled their EM field, where there was one drop of energon there was always more...

The gloom of the evening made the glowing trail in the undergrowth stick out like a broken servo.

There was evidence of someone desperately trying to rub or scratch the telltale stains out of the rocks and plants, but obviously they were in a hurry. Was the rain a concern for them? No, Decepticon reasoning was never that simple. This one was smart enough to know they could be followed- but who would be chasing them? If they’d been injured, Megatron wouldn’t likely waste time finishing them off. He’d expect them to run away and die by themselves, and saving him the effort would likely be seen as a great honor in their final moments.

The spread of the energon drops increased as Optimus followed them further through the forest, eventually turning to thick streaks down the side of a mountain that reared up amongst the trees. The stone wall then narrowed and lead down to a cave that would have been invisuble in the shield of rain, if not for the opening being framed with a familiar luminescent blue.

Optimus re-assessed the potential state that the fleeing Decepticon must have been in as he descended the rocky face of the mountain. Such a feat was hard enough for the Prime, in full health and state of mind, as he tried to maneuver himself so his plating wouldn’t scrape against boulders. His frame was large and cumbersome for work like this though, so despite their injuries the Decepticon must have been nimble enough to traverse the stones without falling and snapping something off. Yes, he was certain now that it was the 'Con who was injured, else he would have been ambushed by now. Even so, they were known to act desperately whether they were able to fend off danger or not- either fighting to the bitter end or, more commonly, fleeing from the battle with whatever they could save of themselves. The glowing barrels of his guns burned through the darkness as he approached the mouth of the cave, pausing at the energon stains to scan the black beyond with narrowed optics. Standing closer, he now noticed the way the fuel was painted on the rock. Unlike the clumsy smudges and accidental drops that had lead him here, these marks were almost deliberate.

Like a warning.

"Back away, Prime."

Optimus swung his guns towards the direction of the voice; a feral hiss embedded with a venom that he'd never encountered before. Deeper into the cave, two dull pink lights barely cut through the gloom. Their beholder had shied far back into the shadow of the shelter, away from the rain and the moonlight that threatened to break away her cover. Yes, there was only one Decepticon with optics like those.

“Airachnid…?” She was alone, no detectable Vehicon escort or hidden officers that Optimus could see. And, from the fizzling of her energy field as well as the energon she’d shed, she was severely injured. Despite her warning, Optimus stepped forward.

"I said BACK AWAY!" she shrieked, fangs bared in a fierce snarl with two of her back legs brought up, ready to slice and shear his plating if he dared come into range of them. Optimus halted, but did not retreat from her burning gaze. His optics, their reticules magnifying in the dark, could pick out only certain details of her tensed frame with the rest of her body hidden by the cave’s shadow. He could tell that she was taking the defensive stance, which was very strange for someone like her, even when she was wounded. But, it seemed, old habits were dying and conventions were forced to change with the rebirth of war. After all, hadn’t Starscream proved himself a restrained, almost _amicable_ leader when Megatron had left to explore the space around Earth?

Very, very strange things were happening indeed. Even Optimus’ own magnetic field, the one he’d relied on to make sure he was truly alone, wasn’t making sense now. It felt Airachnid’s, in all its fizzing frenzy, but there was a second force conflicting within it. Something tiny, an EM flux that might as well have not been there from how slight it was. But it _was_ there, if Optimus’ systems were not glitching with all the moisture, and it made no sense. But neither did finding the likes of Airachnid like this.

"Has the damp gone to your processor, Prime?!” she continued to hiss, trying to fend him away with barbed words instead of talons. “Get away from me before I claw out-!" Her threat was ended with a cry of pain, and the pink lights of her optics were suddenly extinguished. What Optimus could see of her body now slumped to the granite floor, servos folded around her chest and helm dipped in defeat. Too weak to move, and the heavy loss of energon would have likely disabled her ranged weapons. The infamous hunter of the Decepticons, sadism and taint incarnate, now lay as helpless as a sparkling before him. His gun hummed from the ready charge of plasma loaded into it, aimed steadily at the broken femme.

One twitch of his digit would light the cavern with what was left of her energon. One simple reflex would end centuries of murder and a universal genocide.

His next actions would mean the life or death of more than just one bot. And, in that moment, he realised just how true that fact was.

His instruments were not malfunctioning, and Airachnid was not alone after all. She was helpless as a newborn sparkling, with their blind optics and bare protoform… and EM fields barely bigger than the growing sparks they protected.

"Where are your Decepticon brethren?" Optimys asked, lowering his weapons to look into Airachnid's optics as they blinked open once more. She made a noise, like a scoff edged with razor-wire, followed by coughing as thick droplets of fresh energon covered the distance between the two ancient enemies.

"What does it matter to you?" she growled. "They're far away from here. They won't care about my demise any more than you will. So just put me out of my misery, _Autobot_."

"You know I cannot do that, Airachnid," Optimus told her, causing the spider's dimming optics to widen in suspicion.

"And just why not?" He noticed how she crawled backwards towards the nearest wall of the cave despite her injuries, and the sharp edge of fear that had now crept into her voice.

"Because," Optimus transformed his gun back to its servo form, and stood resolute against the background of thunder and rain that had now arrived to herald the scene. "I will not create an orphan."

Airachnid's faceplate cycled through a rainbow of emotions; surprise, outrage, confusion, some that even Optimus did not recognise when painted on a fierce face like hers, some that came and went too fast for him to categorise, and some that reminded him of another femme from long ago that, like the rains in Kaon, he tried not to think about. Finally, at the crest of her confession, Airachnid lowered her helm again against her knees in defeat.

"What gave it away?" she whispered, as if her vocaliser was about to close up permanently.

"I know a mother when I see one,” he told her. “A _new_ one, especially so." When he approached the mouth of the cave, this time Airachnid did not force him away. She stared off blankly at the sheet of hammering rain outside, turning her face away from the Prime so that he could not see it when the brief flashes of lightening struck across the sky. Her spider legs lay purposefully folded in a shield around her back, the joints twitching in spasms. There, in the centre of that mass of razor-tipped rods, Optimus could sense the small magentic flux, the smaller spark within frantically ticking away.

The spider was protecting her offspring. To see her caring for any living creature, to see her with any progeny at all, was a jolt to the Prime who had thought he’d seen everything his kind was capable of during the long war.

The being sitting before him was not Airachnid, not the one that had haunted the Autobots since the war left Cybertron a hollow shell, not even the one that had found herself on Earth just mere months ago. She was a fading shadow of that Airachnid, a haunting of her former self.

Something had happened in those months since her arrival. Something that had smashed her into pieces, leaving her clinging to those tiny vestiges of her former self even as her personality was unwillingly rewritten into something foreign, something alien and disgusting to her. He could see it in how she shuddered, how her claws wanted to tear at her armor, how furious she was at herself for letting anyone, let alone a Prime, see her in a state like this.

And now one question was left hanging in the air like a viral disease, waiting for the moment of infection; what had scarred her so much that her unbreakable core had been shattered like glass?

Well, there was only one thing that would leave her with a newborn as well.

"Need I ask who the sire is?"

Airachnid flinched at the mention of that word, her optics shuttering from a sudden and unmistakable flare of anguish. As he’d feared, Optimus' worst suspicions were correct.

"There was a reason why I split from the Decepticons in the first place.” This voice was now barely a whisper, almost drowned out completely by the thunder. “Megatron always held a special interest in me. Thought I was exotic... a _war prize_..." Her tone was mocking, but underlined with regret. "I knew it was only a matter of time before he... acted." She swung her optics to meet Optimus’, pink and blue swirling together with the intensity of her accusing glare.

"If it wasn't for the Autobots, I would never have had to go back there. Back to _him_..." Optimus was not scared of her anger. Such fury needed somewhere to go, either towards herself or whoever was nearest, and Optimus was the only target available. A mother’s instincts would not let such feelings go towards a newborn, not even if the mother felt they were earned. But that only made such feelings more intense and bitter, and in need of someone to blame for them.

And then Airachnid choked, and not even the thunder could cover up the sobs that came from her throat. She was always shown to be capable, adaptable, at home in any environment. That is, any _except_ from her home, which was now unable to sustain even Scraplets. The irony was as heavy as the thud of the rain, and it was almost terrifying seeing such a strong femme struggling to even speak.

Strong, yes. Airachnid was an immoral, selfish, manipulative and devious creature, but not even Arcee would ever call her weak. Arcee… what would she think of something like this? Her enemy, the cause of so much of her suffering, being a victim of her own cause and cast-out to rot. The humans had a word for things like this. Karma. ‘What goes around comes around’. Optimus wondered if Arcee would have thought something like this was too much punishment even for someone like her. Or, perhaps not _enough_.

No. No one deserved a fate such as this. Optimus would not even consider such thoughts.

"You kept all this to yourself?" he asked her, and it was the only way he could show a form of sympathy that she would accept. Even so, Airachnid's glare sharpened to steel.

"Who would have listened?" she growled, her claws scoring the rock beneath her with deep gouges. "Who would have _cared_? Do you know how it feels, Prime? Have you ever thought you'd finally escaped something so stupid and pointless and … _hopeless_... only to be dragged right back into Unicron’s hands?" Her mouth twisted into a shaking frown, and her optics burned brighter even with her fuel still bleeding away. Optimus remained silent, and her helm fell forwards in an exhausted slump.

"Just go... leave me and my burden to die with some _dignity_." Silence prevailed, save for the constant ambience of rain-soaked nature, for the next few tense moments. Optimus needed those moments to think of what to say.

"Airachnid," he began. "If the Decepticons have done this to you…” He stopped himself, knowing she would not appreciate any sign of pity. “If they no longer welcome you, then you are a rogue. A neutral, in all respects. And I will not allow a neutral to die if there is any possibility that I can save them. Especially not one with a child." Airachnid scoffed again at his foolish and noble words, refusing to meet his gaze, refusing to move at all. Maybe she couldn’t anymore, with all her energy now depleted.

"Please, Airachnid... let me help you. And your sparkling." More silence. More rain. More minuscule thuds from the newborn spark shielded at her back. Something like a sigh pushed past her vocaliser as the legs wrapped behind her started to coil out. Her servos reached behind, into that unfolding arrangement, and her hands now held a tiny bundle of her webbing. It was wrapped in the silk as a makeshift cocoon, and she had probably used the last of her energy just to make the cover for her child. She cradled it close to her chestplates, near her spark chamber. Helm dipped downwards, optics squeezed shut, a familiar and spark-breaking sight.

Optimus had seen such images far more times than he ever cared to remember. Mothers desperately shielding their sparklings from whatever lay ahead, be it an advancing armada or incoming grenade or flying shrapnel. Rarely did both, or either, make it out of those situations alive. And now Airachnid was hiding her child from a future that was as dark and cold as the earthly night outside. He had seen mothers defiant to the end in an effort to protect their last link to their dying planet, and mothers-to-be sacrificing everything but their spark to stay alive, and those who never had the chance to carry being shot through their chambers... and the memory caused his own optics to flutter.

It was not a good time to be remembering her. It never was.

"You both need energon," Optimus said, eliciting a condescending glare from Airachnid, a sliver of her old self still fighting to stay alive.

"And you just so happen to carry cubes around with you?" she asked mockingly, frowning while still running her claws down the sparkling with such gentleness that they didn’t seem like claws at all.

"As a matter of fact, I do." From his subspace he retracted two cyan cubes, and their fresh glow tore right through the dark, bringing Airachnid’s hungry face into full view. His hand only barely moved out of the way of her extended leg, the barb reaching to snatch the cubes up. When her grasp was empty, she gave him a deep frown as he held the fuel out of her reach.

"If I give you this energon,” he told her, “I expect your first move will be to attack me once your weaponry regains power. Therefore, you must let me manually disable your offense systems before I give you your life."

For a nanoklick, Airachnid actually appeared to consider the offer- as if it was fair to her, as if she even had a choice- before reluctantly nodding. Optimus edged closer, keeping his optics firmly on the irregular twitches of her spider legs as his EM field tried to balance out the erratic crackle of her own. Those legs were always a cause of fascination, or at least curiosity sourced from revulsion. The Prime, like all other bots, did not know of how Airachnid evolved into a techno-organic being, as her mysterious kind were known. And he wasn't sure if he wanted to know.  
  
"She hasn't made a sound," Airachnid said numbly, still so lightly running her talons down the blanket of webbing as Optimus cautiously knelt next to her. "Not when she was birthed. Not even when...” Airachnid paused as the Prime took her servo, turning the palm upwards so he could see where the fuel-line for her blasters lead to, and he thought that she might just abandon the sentence entirely before she exhaled through her fangs.

“…When her brother was shot right in front of her."

Optimus froze, the only time in that surreal evening that he’d yet been shocked still. He had long ago realised that one never did just accept the everyday horrors of war- those that were common knowledge, and those that no-one should ever know of. Just when you thought that you'd seen the worst of what your kind had to offer, a new grisly event lay around the corner. Hearing that Megatron had forced a spark-bond upon one of his own was horrifying enough. To then kill the product of such a union, to dispose of something so precious as a new life in a world where the old ones were quickly going extinct…

"I'm sorry to hear that, Airachnid." And he was. There was no proper way to express it, no easy way to show his sincerity when Decepticons so often seemed to be an entirely different species to the easily-sympathetic Autobots. Though, while one hand held her servo by the wrist, the other placed itself lightly upon her palm. A gentle grip, meant to soothe and ground whoever received it. So long as that whoever wasn’t Airachnid, of course.

"Your apology means nothing to me," she snarled, jerking her servo away from his touch. "He shouldn’t have existed in the first place. In the end, he's still a charred stain on the Nemesis floor... and his sister might as well be dead too."

If Optimus didn't know Airachnid better than she perhaps knew herself, he would have sworn that her optics were leaking coolant. Her servo fell back into place at her side and he took it again, this time with no resistance as he focused on the job. Once he found the cable that routed power from her tanks to her blasters, he’d only need to clip them to render her lasers and webbing useless. As for her acid and razor legs... well, he'd cross that bridge when he came to it. Whether or not that bridge was just a few klicks away, ready to collapse underneath him. As he performed the delicate work, privately wondering how Ratchet could do such procedures every cycle with stakes far higher than a broken blaster port, Airachnid talked to herself. Or perhaps to her daughter, who remained curled up tight in her cocoon by her unlikely mother’s spark.

“There was nothing I could do. Nothing at all. I hid the both of them away as I tried to think of how to escape. I found the femme where I left her. But her brother… he’d wandered out somehow. Megatron was at the end of the corridor. I ducked into a maintanence closet before he saw me, and… I saw him obliterate the child. He didn’t even recognise it as his own. Which is a mercy, I suppose. And it was a valuable lesson learned.”

“Lesson?” Optimus finished the wire of the first servo, breaking it right through and giving her a moment to hiss in pain. With her weapons disabled, at least some of her energon would go to more vital systems instead.

“That these children could not be easily disposed of,” Airachnid replied, not even mustering the strength to be angry at him for listening. “You’ll expect that I considered the act myself. And I did. I never asked for these sparklings. They weren’t supposed to be here, and there was nowhere else for them to go. Even as I picked up the femme, I was thinking of how best to end her. But as her brother died… a part of my spark died as well. I realised then that these things did not just come from my core. They were tied to it. Quite literally, they are parts of myself that must be nurtured before I can take them back.”

Optimus had heard such a philosophy from an old swordmaster, from better days. Dai Atlas, his name might have been. Before the Well gave its last gasp of new sparks and doomed the fractured Cybertronians to a slow and sure extinction, bond-born sparks were a rare sight. Bots like Dai Atlas saw a beauty and vulnerability in rearing life within the body Primus had gifted, in taking what He had given them and using it to create something new and- perhaps- better. Orion, as he’d been known back then, had not known the truth in those words until he’d met the femme he wanted to make something better with. A new Cybertron. A new way of life…

The death of a child was said to be like the death of a sparkmate. Neither were wounds that would ever heal. 

“Even knowing all that,” Airachnid continued, briefly saving Optimus from memories too precious to have any place in the present, “I might have still been able to do it. To sever the last tie that binds, to save the parts of myself that still mattered. If not for…” Her grip on her daughter tightened as she discussed the prospect of killing her, and as she looked up Optimus saw that her faceplate was tracked with coolant streams after all.

“If not for what?” he pressed. What else had fate done to her?

"If not for the giant spiders of Archa Seven. Do you know them?”

Archa Seven.

He knew the place well. The system. The war that had found itself there. It was a place that he hoped and prayed never to hear of again. He could practically feel his energon lines freezing over, the thunder above the cave mirroring the roiling thud of his long-broken spark. His digits had pinched over a line of wires inside her servo plating, and it took all his strength to bring himself to twist them into breaking.

"I have... heard of the planet," Optimus confessed as Airachnid exhaled sharply, bringing her cocooned sparkling even closer to her chest. "But I am not familiar with its inhabitants."

With Airachnid now relatively disarmed, Optimus held the first energon cube near her. She swiftly grabbed and brought it to her lips, gulping the precious liquid down. It was empty in less than than a klick and she sighed deeply as her systems began to recover, energon tanks refilling and auto-repairs going to work. Optimus held out the other cube, which she took more hesitantly this time. With a glance at the Prime, she turned her back on him so that he couldn’t see her sparkling. From this new perspective he could see that Airachnid's choice of using only two legs to threaten him with wasn't a choice at all; they were the only ones she had left. The others must have been lost in her escape from the Nemesis… and with such integral parts of her alt-mode gone, she was stranded here.

"Marvellous creatures, those spiders," she continued as she fed her sparkling away from his sight. "A single hive mind, ruled by a queen. Similar to Insecticons. And _ferociously protective_ of their young..." The last sentence ended in a regretful growl, and she threw the empty energon cube away in anger. “I knew that even before _this_. I learned so much about them, as I became them.”

"The spiders of that planet made you this way?” Optimus asked carefully. As little as he knew about the nature of techno-organics, he was conscious that this would likely be a sensitive subject. Though, Airachnid had already revealed so much to him with nowhere to run and no way to kill him. “Are you… one of them?”

Airachnid looked at him over her shoulder, her fangs almost covered by her lips before she pulled them back in a mocking bark of laughter.

"You tell me, Prime. Am I Decepticon, rogue, organic? Am I even Cybertronian?" She turned around fully, a hand pillowing the head of her cradled sparkling. "Whatever my relation to those spiders, we both share that one damned trait. And sooner or later it will be my ruin.” She said it bitterly, even as she held the object of her hate so tenderly, even as she slumped with her broken legs. "The instincts they gave me have never betrayed me before... and now I don’t even know what they’re trying to tell me. I have no say in it. If my brain had to choose between keeping myself or my child alive… I don’t even know which one it would pick.”

She couldn’t be a monster even if she wanted to. And _did_ she want to? It was impossible for even Optimus to say. He was left kneeling there, forced to re-evaluate everything he thought he’d known about her. She had instincts, like an animal, like one who was not in control. She had been twisted into something new and unwanted once before, and now it was happening to her all over again.

How much of the Airachnid that had killed so many Autobots, so many creatures, was really her? How much of her was he seeing right now? Even without the loss of a child, the forced bond on her spark, the mutilation of her body… she didn’t know who she was. Who she was supposed to be. She looked like she was in so much pain, more than even she could inflict on another.

And deep down, Optimus knew she deserved it. Deeper still, he knew that _no-one_ deserved it.

"What will you do now?” he asked, unable to think of where she could possibly go. “With the Decepticons behind you and a sparkling to care for..."

Airachnid shrugged, a defiantly casual gesture to everything that had just happened, with her last two legs dangling uselessly from her back as she turned away from him to wipe new tears of coolant away.

"I'm a scavenger,” she declared, even though that was surely just a label to cling to. “I'll adapt. As I always do."

"You need a method of finding unclaimed energon deposits,” he reminded her, “and a way to extract viable fuel from-“

" _I can deal with it_ ," she cut in defiantly, her remaining legs jerking in newly-energised irritation. "I've survived one war already. I can make it through another, so long as you stay out of my way."

" _You_ have survived a war, Airachnid,” he corrected, “but no sparkling ever has… not without help."

The former Decepticon stared at him in a slowly-growing disbelief. She was smart, and she quickly realised what Optimus was offering. The only thing he could offer, before he could leave her like this. As he expected, her reaction was not one of gratitude.

"The day I believe the _Autobots_ would aid me is the day I kiss the Allspark," she spat in extreme scepticism, depositing her wrapped sparkling back into the safety of her back legs’ connector joint.

"You are right. The Autobots as a whole will not help you." Optimus’ blue gaze held steady as it faced her. "But I will."

Airachnid looked at him like he was a Minicon on stilts, like he was a Sharkticon beached at the edge of the Rust Sea- in a word, like he was a fool. And she made a point to tell him such, just in case he didn’t quite get it.

"You are an _idiot_ , Prime," she groaned, and it was the most sincere thing he’d ever heard come from her fangs. "I have nothing to give you that you or your Autobots would want. Why would you help me only to hinder yourself?"

“You don’t believe that a foolish Prime has a duty to help all those in need?”

“I can believe something _stupid_ like that, sure. But times have changed. You don’t have a wealth of resources to give away to anyone who asks for it. So answer me, properly. _Why_ would you help me?”

Optimus straightened, feeling his jaw-hinge throb as he reset the plate. If she wanted a true answer, then he would give her it.

“Because I believe that redemption can be earned by anyone who truly wants it. Because that sparkling you have is proof that some good, some very small sliver of good, might still make it out of this war alive. Because…” He thought again if this was something he wanted to acknowledge, something he wanted her to know, and his mind did not change. “You are not the only one who lost a part of themselves on Archa Seven.”

Airachnid blinked, her optics flashing once in a moment of surprise. “What did you lose?”

With great difficulty, his voice edged with hurt that had long ago lost its edge, Optimus told her. She wouldn’t believe him if he didn’t.

“A person. A soldier. A dear friend. Someone...who then, was my world. And when she was gone, that was when the war truly began. That was when I vowed to take Megatron's life as his war did Elita One's.” Just saying her name was like a bullet through his glossa, but he didn’t regret it. To forget her, to consign her to the vault of his memories was a fate worse than that which really came for her. If she only lived on in this one conversation, this one attempt at Prime trying to save another victim of Archa for whom it was not too late, then it was worth the pain of remembering her absence.

“So answer me, properly,” he asked Airachnid, deliberately mirroring her own stern demand. “Will you let me help you?”

She looked at him in silence, and for a moment the rain, the thunder, even the wind seemed to cut out so as not to interrupt her. It was a long moment, a sorrowful moment before she let herself give in.

"Very well. Until I find myself to be self-sustainable..." She had some difficulty getting her next words past a blockade of pride. "I will accept whatever help you will give to me. And my sparkling. But I promise nothing in return."

Optimus nodded, for it was good enough. The only thing he wanted was something she could not yet give, not until she decided who she was and who she wanted to be. It would be a long road, and the sparkling might be full grown before she reached the end of it. But it was worth a try. Just once, Optimus wanted proof that his belief in redemption wasn’t one he’d held in vain all this time. For if Airachnid could change, then the rest of the Decepticons were not utterly lost.

His work here was done, and so he rose to leave. Airachnid would want to rest by herself, regaining her strength as the truth of her situation settled in her spark. The pounding rain had washed the entrance of the cave clean, leaving no sign at all that a Cybertronian was nearby. Even with her weapons down, so long as she stayed hidden Optimus was sure she’d be safe from Decepticon eyes until he met her again. Whenever that might be.

Above him, the moon was obscured by rain-clouds and almost half-way though its nightly transit. Ratchet would be worrying by now. Optimus opened his commlink, a surreal feeling as he connected to the outside world. The moments he’d shared with Airachnid had felt like they’d taken place on another planet, in another timeline entirely. She was an entirely different person, after all. Whether that person was better or worse would remain to be seen.

_"Ratchet, this is Optimus. I need a Ground Bridge."_

_"Understood,"_ came the medic's voice at the other end of the comm line, a sigh of relief punctuating the acknowledgement. Then, right on cue, a green-blue vortex yawned in front of Optimus.

"Prime!" Airachnid called from the cave just before he stepped into the spinning opening of the Ground Bridge, and for a moment he thought she might bolt forward to try and go through it. But she did not move, did not shudder in the rain or even twitch her fragile legs.

"Elita One..." She almost had to choke the name out, as if it was something forbidden- and how right she was. “Was she... taken by the spiders?"

A solemn nod answered her.

"…I’m sorry to hear that," she told him in a whisper, which Optimus' picked up even through the barrage of moisture against rocks. He gave her another nod of acknowledgement, regardless of whether she meant it.

"You will come back? Soon?"

Another silence stretched out between them, broken only by the endless hammer of rain. Not sludge, or oil, nothing but harmless clean water. But after hearing what Megatron was truly capable of, Optimus still felt filthy as he stood there.

"I will,” he told her, so desperate to fix what his former friend had broken and sullied. “I promise."

Primes kept their people safe, kept the history of their people intact, and- most of all- they kept promises. Just because she was not willing to make them yet did not mean that he couldn’t set an example.


End file.
